itch.io

Excellent, thank you for letting me know!

I appreciate your response. You're right that this isn't competing with ChatGPT on price or versatility - it can't.

What I'm testing is whether there's a niche audience that values this particular combination of structured card game and dynamic narrative enough to pay the premium. That audience may be small, and that's ok.

As for the price, it is unfortunately dictated by the cost of serving the experience, not what I think it *should* cost.

The main reason you'd consider this over straight ChatGPT is that there's a full card game, with rules and a balanced challenge, integrated with the AI content. ChatGPT is great for freeform roleplay, but this is designed as an actual game experience.

I've been working on this for a while. The core idea: you describe a setting - any setting - and the AI generates the cards, story, and narrative to match. Every card you draft, every threat you face, every story choice you make is themed by the AI to fit your setting and the story that's unfolding.

You can play preset settings if you want - vampire-ruled Rome, court intrigue in a realm of warring houses, cyberpunk Neo-Tokyo. Or make it personal: your hometown as the kingdom, your friends as the characters, that grudge you've been nursing as the central conflict. The more personal the setting, the better the game.

https://gpawley.itch.io/thronedream

This is early access. The game works and it's fully playable, but it's not polished. I'm looking for people who want to try something experimental and tell me what's broken or missing.

Also: AI generation costs money. There's a free trial to see if it's your kind of thing. After that, you buy credits that get consumed as you play. I know that's unusual - it's the reality of real-time generation right now.

Happy to answer questions. If you try it, I genuinely want to know what you'd change.

Here it is: https://github.com/gpawley/FastCrawl

Hey there! Looks like some kind of problem with loading the image files. Hard to tell what without spending some significant time on this, but from some quick research it's possible that this can be solved by just installing the "gdiplus" verb in Lutris.

Otherwise, I'd be happy to share the source code if that would help you resolve the issue.

I'd rather not

Glad to hear you enjoyed the game! Unfortunately it's unlikely I'll ever do any more work on it. I hope you find some other way to get it to work on your Linux machine.

It's not actually publically available right now, sorry.  Some people have access to a closed alpha.  Itch is a bit clunky in handling this situation.

Haha, I hadn't thought of that but it's probably inevitable.

If I set up a Kickstarter, I will make a demo version of the game available during that period.

Yeah, I am sitting on this a little.  Thanks for the vote of confidence in the meantime :)

Hey there, glad you're as excited as I am about the game :).  The game needs some more time in alpha right now, please bear with me!

Thank you

Hey, thanks for clearing that up.  If that's the standard functionality, I'm fine with it.

It's more confusing on the devlog then it is on the main page, because the reader is asked to Buy the game instead of downloading the attached file.

Hey, thanks for answering.

I did indeed tick "Download key can be claimed".  I also ticked "Require key to be claimed".  And in the test the key WAS claimed.  Which is why I am not expecting "Buy Now" to still be visible.

I'm planning to use itch.io to host a game project for my internal testing group, eventually rolling it out to a larger closed beta via the refinery tools.

From the documentation, I assumed (perhaps mistakenly) that I could give my internal testers a download key and they would then be treated by the itch.io platform as having purchased the game normally.  However they still get the Buy Now button when they go to the game page, or when they read a devlog to which I have attached the game build.  As far as I can tell, the only way for them to download the latest build is through their My Library page.

Is this normal behaviour or am I missing something please?

That brought a smile to my face.  Thank you for writing that :)

Thank you!